Fresh off the Republican debate earlier this week in Nevada, presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann makes a foray into blue-state country for a talk at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

The Minnesota congresswoman’s subject? “The Revival of American Competitiveness.”

“Bachmann will present her views on pro-business economic policies that will allow private-sector businesses to compete in the global market while addressing the need for job-skill retraining, innovation, comprehensive tax reform and reduction of regulations that threaten jobs,” the Commonwealth Club’s website says.

California’s birthrate tumbled last year to its lowest point since the Great Depression, new state figures show, yet another indication that the difficult economy is reshaping everyday life.California families are looking at their personal finances, their job security, their prospects for the future – and increasingly deciding now is not the time to have a baby.

Marriages are down, foreclosures are up, job openings are scarce and kids are expensive. The average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is about $225,000, federal data show.

“A lot of the people I see say, ‘One (child) is enough: It’s all I can afford,’ ” said Anna Peak, owner of Babies & Beyond, a children’s-goods store in the Land Park section of Sacramento.Other, more permanent changes also are taking place. The children of immigrants are having fewer kids than their parents did. The population as a whole is getting older. Couples are waiting longer to start families.

Because of those patterns, the state will see strikingly low birthrates for the rest of the decade, said John Malson, acting chief of the state Department of Finance’s demographic research unit.

California is experiencing what once was a familiar hiatus between elections – a traditional 20-month span between the November general election and the next primary election in June of the following even-numbered year.

The last statewide election was November 2010 and the next primary is June 2012. The last time there was such a gap was from November 1996 to June 1998.

But it’s not a period of tranquility – redistricting has seen to that. For termed-out lawmakers the options are difficult, but incumbents aren’t having an easy ride either.

And it hasn’t been easy on consultants — especially Republican consultants – who rely on political campaigns to pay their bills, noted one strategist.

“I think this is an unprecedented time for a lot of consultants, especially Republican consultants,” said Tim Hart of Sacramento-based Premier Strategies, a campaign strategy firm whose clientele include GOP candidates. “It is a difficult time. We’ve gone through something of a metamorphosis because of Whitman spending $174 million and still not winning. That impacted a lot of donors in California, making it more difficult to raise money,” said Hart in a telephone interview from Guatemala.

Hart was in Guatemala with former California Republican Party Chair Ron Nehring to handle the Nov. 6 campaign for a presidential candidate.

I’ve talked to a lot of guys – consultants, designers, website guys – and everybody is hurting. They all talk frequently about what is next and that it’s been tough on everybody.”

The decennial redrawing of political districts in California – this time handled by an independent, voter-approved commission – has turned the election map into musical chairs in the Legislature and in Congress, pitting incumbents against each other and forcing others to move to new districts.

“How do you run for Senate or Assembly if you don’t know yet who’s running for Congress? How do you look at other seats until you know where the Congressional seats are?” said political strategist Matt Ross, a former staffer for the Senate GOP caucus.

“The big question is what they will be doing during the 20 months,” he said. “With the redistricting and the top-two primary, it’s going to change how you fight, it’s a different dynamic. I’ve never seen an election like this.”

“We need to regulate cannabis so that we know what we’re recommending to our patients. Currently, medical and recreational cannabis have no mandatory labeling standards of concentration or purity. First we’ve got to legalize it so that we can properly study and regulate it.”

Whatever happened to studying a drug first to determine its benefits and risks, then deciding whether it’s safe enough to legalize? I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer. But the CMA thesis is that marijuana research is inhibited because the federal government classifies pot in the same illegal category as heroin and LSD.

The CMA Board of Trustees adopted the “legalize pot” position on behalf of the association’s 35,000 physician members. Its action was based on a 14-page “white paper.”

“It really should be called the Cannabis Medical Assn.,” says Covina Police Chief Kim Raney, vice president of the California Police Chiefs Assn. “It’s probably one of the most irresponsible, disgraceful position papers I’ve ever read.”

What raised my eyebrows was a repeat of the old canard about how locking up stoners eats up too much tax money.

The CMA report lamented “the diversion of limited economic resources to penal system costs and away from the other more socially desirable uses such as funding healthcare, education, transportation, etc.”

That’s a stretcher, at least in California.

Our prisons aren’t exactly bulging with people who were sent there for growing or selling grass, let alone ingesting it. Fewer than 1% of the inmates have been sentenced for marijuana or hashish crimes of any sort, according to state prison data.

They total 1,325 out of 164,156. If you do the math — each prisoner costing nearly $50,000 a year — it isn’t chump change: around $66million. But it’s hardly noticeable in a $10-billion prison budget.

“With all the strains on our resources, going after small levels of marijuana possession is not a priority,” says Scott Thorpe, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Assn. “To go to prison for a drug offense, it’s going to be very, very, very rare that it’s for a first offense. Any drug.”

The CMA report notes that in the last decade there have been a dozen U.S. clinical trials and more than 20 studies worldwide investigating the therapeutic benefits of pot smoking. “Current data have shown that the medical indications for cannabis are very limited,” the report says.

“Cannabis may be effective for the treatment of pain, nausea, anorexia and other conditions, but the literature on this subject is inadequate … and cannabis side effects may not be tolerated.”

OK, still, if someone feels the healing need for marijuana, it can legally be acquired in California.

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer told lawmakers Wednesday that he continued to support a law that grants large tax breaks to alternative-energy companies — even though the bankrupt solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra was its first and largest recipient.

Solyndra was granted a $34.5 million subsidy under SB 71, a 2010 law championed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that exempts alternative energy companies from paying taxes on purchases of new manufacturing equipment.

Lockyer’s statements marked a departure from the stance he took last month. After The Bay Citizen revealed Solyndra’s tax break, which the state granted without scrutinizing the company’s finances, Lockyer called for a moratorium on issuing additional subsidies under the law, saying, “[W]e owe it to taxpayers to see if there is more we can do to make sure we don’t give their money to companies headed for a fall.”

But on Wednesday, he told a joint hearing of two state Senate committees that SB 71 is a “wise and needed law” that incentivizes green-energy manufacturing and serves as “a model for how tax expenditure statutes ought to be written.”

The state’s largest doctor group is calling for legalization of marijuana, even as it pronounces cannabis to be of questionable medical value.

Trustees of the California Medical Assn., which represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, adopted the position at their annual meeting in Anaheim late Friday. It is the first major medical association in the nation to urge legalization of the drug, according to a group spokeswoman, who said the larger membership was notified Saturday.

Dr. Donald Lyman, the Sacramento physician who wrote the group’s new policy, attributed the shift to growing frustration over California’s medical marijuana law, which permits cannabis use with a doctor’s recommendation. That, he said, has created an untenable situation for physicians: deciding whether to give patients a substance that is illegal under federal law.

“It’s an uncomfortable position for doctors,” he said. “It is an open question whether cannabis is useful or not. That question can only be answered once it is legalized and more research is done. Then, and only then, can we know what it is useful for.”

The CMA’s new stance appears to have as much to do with politics as science. The group has rejected one of the main arguments of medical marijuana advocates, declaring that the substance has few proven health benefits and comparing it to a “folk remedy.”

The group acknowledges some health risk associated with marijuana use and proposes that it be regulated along the lines of alcohol and tobacco. But it says the consequences of criminalization outweigh the hazards.

Lyman says current laws have “proven to be a failed public health policy.” He cited increased prison costs, the effect on families when marijuana users are imprisoned and racial inequalities in drug-sentencing cases.

It seems the California Medical Association, like the California Dental Association have jumped the shark with regard with being in touch with their own members. Both organizations have been taken over by the LEFT and this, like other policy pronouncements are as much left-wing politics as science.

I think the CMA will lose quite a few members after this little exercise.

The organization’s announcement provoked some angry response.

“I wonder what they’re smoking,” said John Lovell, spokesman for the California Police Chiefs Assn. “Given everything that we know about the physiological impacts of marijuana — how it affects young brains, the number of accidents associated with driving under the influence — it’s just an unbelievably irresponsible position.”

The CMA’s view is also controversial in the medical community.

Dr. Robert DuPont, an M.D. and professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School, said the association’s call for legalization showed “a reckless disregard of the public health. I think it’s going to lead to more use, and that, to me, is a public health concern. I’m not sure they’ve thought through what the implications of legalization would be.”

California law making personal possession of marijuana an infraction with a ticket fine of $100 is already not enforced from what I can see on the Venice, California strand every Saturday morning where I run. Medical marijuana dispensaries hawk their wares to the Venice Beach goers without regard to proper medical practice.

But, legalize it?

So, that every store front on the beach is stoking “stoned” out beachgoers – come on now. California society does not need more intoxication, “high” drivers or children developing bad habits.